[Leica] M8 and SD cards

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 2:19 AM +0000 3/24/07, grduprey@mchsi.com wrote:
>Dante,
>
>Unfortunately all I have are the Extreme III SD cards, which I 
>assume are accelerated?  Wrtie speed seems to be 1 second or less.
>
>Gene

The only 'accelerated' cards I know of are certain Lexar cards. Nikon 
cameras can apparently take advantage of this to some degree. 
Otherwise the 'speed' of the card is often mentioned, as in 60x, 133x 
or 130x. The basic speed (one) related to the speed that data can 
come off a CD at 'normal' speed, ie, about eighty minutes for 700mb. 
You don't want '1x' cards :-).

Once the speeds get to around a 100x or so, other factors start 
getting more prominent, such as the controller on the chip, and the 
camera hardware. So a 133x card that is faster than another 133x card 
in another camera can become slower when the cards are used in 
different cameras.

The Sandisk Ultra II's seem to be uniformly good in most cameras, and 
are proven performers. The Extreme II's are only very slightly 
faster, are supposedly more rugged, and cost more. Then there are 
III's and even IV's, but there seems to be a direction of diminishing 
returns as the cameras can't take advantage of the speeds offered. 
What does seem to make a difference is the size of the card. Almost 
universally, 1Gb are faster than 2Gb are faster than 4Gb are faster 
than 8Gb. With M8 and DSLR file sizes, 1Gb is a bit small, so 2Gb is 
generally the sweet spot, although the speed hit going to 4Gb isn't 
much.


>-------------- Original message from Dante Stella 
><dstella1@ameritech.net>: --------------
>
>
>>  For people who have used M8s for a while, do you need accelerated SD
>>  cards with the camera? Or is the normal SD write speed generally
>>  sufficient for M-type pictures? I don't see filling up a huge
>>  buffer, and from what I have read, it would be 5 seconds write time
>>  per card for standard-speed SD.
>>
>>  The reason I ask is that my Kodak 14n really likes Microdrives or
>>  accelerated CF - but when writing to the SD card, it doesn't seem to
>>  care how fast the card is.
>>
>>  Thanks
>>  Dante
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  Leica Users Group.
>>  See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>
>_______________________________________________
>Leica Users Group.
>See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information


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